Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Indicators in Oneiric

New annoyed-with-unity-o-meter (indicators made me feel happier):

Indicators

Today I discovered about Indicator Apps. They are just like the applets of GNOME 2 that I could add to my panel, except they're upgraded for GNOME 3 instead. They all sit up the top-left of your screen.

Also, instead of having a nice, single list of these applets where I can choose which ones to add to my panel (like in old Ubuntu), they are now....all over the place.
You basically have to look them up on the internet, add a new repository for each one, install it, and then manually run the program each time you start up to get it showing (well, I lie; you can add them into your auto-startup list to have them runn on their own).
I found this page very helpful in giving a list of the most popular indicator applets and how to install them.
Then, this page gives a much bigger list of applets (although less helpful in how to install them).

Installing Indicator Applets

Since they're not in the standard ubuntu repository, you usually have to update your list of repositories that Ubuntu looks in to get packages.
Let's do an example with the Workspace indicator, which sits in your top panel and lets you switch between workspaces.
Going to its launchpad page, we see "Use this ppa for install: ppa:geod/ppa-geod".

launchpad page for inicitator-workspaces

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:geod/ppa-geod

Then, we update the list of available packages and install indicator-workspaces:

apt-get update
apt-get install indicator-workspaces

But wait! You're not done yet! Go to the dashboard and actually start the indicator. Then it will appear in your notification tray.
If you right-click this one and look at the preferences you'll also see a "Start indicator at login", which you should check, if that's what you want.